While we had another fog this morning, one that lasted for quite a while, I couldn’t be arsed to go out to someplace photogenic to chase pics, so I just went over to the pond to see what could be found. None of the landscape shots that I contemplated were really doing it for me, so I just shot a handful of macro frames, really just noodling around. Two of them, however, produced some nice effects – the same nice effect, in fact.
In the twisted crook of a small vine, some spider webs caught the mist in a cluster of tiny spheres, and cropping down the original frame fairly tightly showed off the multiple Sauron eyes, actually two tree branches in the immediate background brought up by the lens effect of the water. It’s always better to have something really cool to see in such circumstances, and extremely difficult to do. The drops act as fisheye lenses, which makes everything seem smaller, so to see anything with real detail, it has to be extremely close, and at the right angle behind. And it helps if the drops are nice and round.
So then we get to the second one.
That’s a cluster of pine needles, many of them with drops perched at their tips – I just chose a particular one to pin focus on. Did I mention that, in order to see the background sharply through such lenses, focus has to be very specific? Forget autofocus, and we’re not even talking about a fine touch on the manual focus ring; what we’re looking at here is trying to hold still at a precise number of millimeters from the drop, and timing the shutter release within the infinitesimal swaying of my whole body. I’d take credit for excellent control, but I’d be damned to hell (or maybe Manhattan) for lying, since this is one of eight frames and the only one that’s sharp enough. But another was close.
It’s easy to believe you’re seeing more branches in that drop, but you’re not – they’re all pine needles, with a faint peek at the treeline against the water in the distant background. I think, in fact, that the yellow stripe in there is a reflection of the needle that supports the drop. Someday, I’ll locate a scenic little cabin after a snowstorm, and catch a nearby tree just as the snow is starting to melt off, and do a natural snowglobe pic. Sure, that shouldn’t be hard to arrange…
But in lieu of more scenic images from these fog conditions, I’ll return to the last fog, and an image you’ve already seen (probably.) For giggles, I cut it down to just the red channel, which was the least distinct for this image, and a tighter crop to highlight the ghostly nature of the tree.
That’s a really narrow dynamic range, and I like how the top of the tree almost vanishes into white. This is unaltered, by the way, just the way that the red channel looked, and you can see below, in the top row, exactly what the histogram looked like: not exactly an abundance of shadow tones.
The lack of any peaks at all towards the left side of the histogram tells us that there are not even decent middle tones, much less any deep shadow, like that wasn’t obvious from the image itself. But in the middle row, I shifted the bottom end to make the tones within the image fill the entire range from black to white – while it looks like I just clipped out the shadows (left side of the histogram,) technically what happened was telling the program to move the darkest tone, still quite high, all the way down to black, which has the result seen in the accompanying thumbnail.
All tones shifted evenly with this, however, making the top of the tree more distinct than I liked, so in the bottom row, I tweaked the brighter tones back up to where they were, and gave a very slight nudge down in the darkest tones to increase contrast in the foreground grasses – again, the accompanying thumbnail shows the end result. But if that’s not sufficient, here’s the larger version:
So, which one do you like better? I have my own favorite, but I’m curious to know how others see it, so I’m not going to influence your decision.
By the way, the near-monochrome image that I passed on posting for last Sunday’s Slide? It was another fog shot, so I’m glad I skipped it, otherwise I would’ve felt bad featuring even more thin white pics.
Moving on to real content rather than excuses, we did not escape the winter weather that hit the east coast, actually getting a pretty decent snow – not as much as threatened or feared, but in the immediate area it was a couple of inches (pardon me for not using metric, but it just sounds better this way.) Alas, I still had commitments, and had to drive in it for each of the worst days, just not very far. But that meant that I didn’t have much opportunity to shoot photos of it – the first day I spent a lot of time clearing off the cars and the driveway, plus it was overcast and not quite finished snowing, and I didn’t bother even trying to go out. So I did a quick look around on the second day when the sun was out, and by then, the neighborhood had been out with their dogs everywhere and the pristine white blanket was all torn up, greatly limiting my options. Above, I took advantage of the sky reflecting from the textured and incomplete ice cover on the pond and started doing the fartsy thing; seen to the right, the just-barely-frozen surface in another section of the same pond yielded some unusual patterns.
Initially, I thought I knew what made these, but now I’m not exactly sure. The mark from the prominent “thumb” toe (hallux) indicated, to me, a woodpecker of some sort, supported by the size of the tracks, about 35-40mm overall; the woodpeckers have larger-than-average halluces for bracing against trees as they drill for food. But two things made me pause a little. The first is the left-right alternating steps, which doesn’t seem correct to me, but I admit I’ve only seen them scaling trees and not foraging on the ground. Most of the birds in this area hop, keeping both feet together, and the only one I can recall seeing walk left-and-right are crows, but these tracks were too small for them. The second detail is the drag marks between. Again, I thought this was from the hallux, but as I looked at the photos I realized it was from the third phalange, the middle toe, skimming the snow. So at present, I’m not going to positively identify the creator of these tracks.
Soon after spotting the tracks, I also caught a red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) zooming from down low up to a safer tree branch, seeming to confirm my identification. And it still might, but there remains a couple of points to note, such as not being the only bird visible in the area by far, and the snow having gone through an overnight refreeze by the time I was out shooting, turning the surface into a hard crust that was far too tough for a medium-sized bird to leave distinctive tracks; this trail was from the previous day. However, in an area of our yard where The Girlfriend had tossed out some beef and bacon grease, I found an extensive cluster of the same tracks, and woodpeckers are very fond of grease, so make of that what you will.
